Let Them Eat: Chocolate-Stout Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

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From the many, many recipes I've culled from my great-grandmother's and grandmother's cookbooks, one of the most cherished and frequently made is the pineapple "turnover," a.k.a. pineapple upside-down cake. From generation to generation, the cake has been crowned with halos of golden canned pineapple, punctuated with electric-red maraschino cherries, and glossed with a butter and brown sugar glaze. It's an everyday dessert, served warm minutes after it's made or alongside coffee the next morning. Satisfying in that "made by grandma" sort of way, it never loses its luster.

But...I've made that cake a million times and it's high time I put my own imprint on the old thing. And by imprint, I mean booze. If I had it my way, I would add spirits to all of my cakes, firmly believing that a little sneaky peek gets the party going. This cake toasts the old family recipe with a good pint of chocolate stout: robust, toasty, dark, and a tad swarthy, the stout is boiled down and concentrated, then mixed with cocoa powder. The brown sugar-based cake is cocoa-flavored and distinctly accented with rich and lightly acidic notes from the dark brew.

Chocolate and dark draughts are no strangers to each other, but the addition of sweet and tart golden pineapple might come as a surprise. Fresh pineapple spears sink luxuriously into the cake while the butter and brown sugar glaze caramelizes and gently crisps the nooks and crevices in between.

Off with the old and on with the new—this version of my grannies' turnovers might be more my style. Cheers!